Letters to the Editor, Sept. 20

Tuesday

Sep 20, 2016 at 2:00 AMSep 20, 2016 at 5:39 PM

Senators consistent

Oregon’s U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley recently invited a top Interior official to consider public input regarding the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument expansion. This is entirely consistent with the senators’ longstanding support for conservation in the monument area.

Wyden supported the original monument in 2000. In 2006 he co-sponsored a bill to designate a Soda Mountain Wilderness in the monument’s southern backcountry. Merkley’s first vote was for a 2009 public lands bill that made Wyden’s wilderness bill a reality.

Both senators have consistently secured Land and Water Conservation Fund money for the Bureau of Land Management to buy private in-holdings from willing sellers within outer monument boundaries. If not directed locally, this fund is spent elsewhere. It’s not part of Medford BLM’s general budget.

The current Wyden/Merkley O&C bill proposes many conservation and recreation designations for BLM lands near the monument that 85 scientists recommend for inclusion in an expanded monument. These include a Grizzly Peak Backcountry Primitive Area, a half-mile-wide Pacific Crest Trail Protection Corridor, special protection for Jenny Creek, old growth forest heritage areas, conservation emphasis areas and more.

It makes ecological sense to include BLM land in and near these special areas in an expanded monument.

Dave Willis

Greensprings

Limit consumption

Perhaps we humans over-consume and trash our finite planet because we perceive ourselves as being separate from nature. In his book “Seven Brief Lessons in Physics,” Carlo Rovelli states: “We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies ... "

Many of us cling to the false notion that some force outside of nature stays ready to right our wrongs, deflecting our focus from the real world and our abuse of the environment.

Rovelli warns: “We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins [more recently Neaderthals] are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. ... We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality ... [and] the only species that will knowingly watch ... the demise of its civilization.”

Maybe if we limit our consumption to filling basic needs rather than emotional voids, creating less trash and toxins, we can improve the environment for present and future generations.

Marie Arvette

Medford

BLM hypocritical

I'm throughly twisted up on this one. The Bureau of Land Management is now claiming that it won't implement a low-impact community alternative to thin small-diameter trees in the Applegate because it is "inconsistent" with its 1995 logging plan?!

Isn't this the same BLM that just threw its 1995 plan on the scrap heap in order to increase streamside logging while eliminating the Applegate Adaptive Management Area?

Hypocrisy, thy name is BLM.

Amy Dickenson

Ashland

Trump is self-possessed

Thanks to Claude Aron for his very insightful letter, "Trump's simplistic solutions," Sept. 14. I might add, spending $20,000 of his foundation money on a full-length portrait of himself shows how self-possessed he truly is.